Green Genes: Quoted in Forbes!

by Karl Haro von Mogel on 12 February 2010

A few weeks ago I talked to Matthew Herper from Forbes Magazine, he was writing a story about Monsanto and was looking for some outside perspectives, and had already talked to Pam Ronald. I ended up talking ad nauseum about the blog and what we hope to do with it. Shortly thereafter, the story went up, called The Planet versus Monsanto, and after reading it, I thought, aw, no plug! It’s a good story, though, and it frames the issue in an interesting fashion:

“Monsanto’s first round of attackers said its seeds were evil. Now the charge is that Monsanto’s seeds are too good.”

Well, I just got word that Herper has another story in Forbes Magazine – apparently his conversations with Pam and I turned into a new story called Green Genes – and I daresay he picked a couple of good quotes from me. Naturally, Pam and Raoul were the stars:

Now Ronald, 49, and Adamchak, 55, have become proselytizers for the marriage of genetically modified foods and organic farming. Their goal: crops that limit the use of pesticides and fertilizers while delivering more food per acre planted. They wrote a book together, Tomorrow’s Table. An opinion piece she wrote for the Boston Globe won a 2009 National Association of Science Writers prize. They give lectures. They are leading a chorus of young scientists and forward thinkers who see genetic modification not as a threat to sustainable farming but as a new way to make it better. They are not fans of corporate agriculture but think genetically modified organisms represent a missed opportunity to make things better.

These true believers come as a flood of new gene crops approaches. The European Union estimates the number of GM traits in crops will quadruple to 120 by 2015. Only half will be made by for-profit companies. Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the back-to-the-land movement, has been arguing fiercely that environmentalists need to drop their anti-GM stance. So has Karl Haro von Mogel, a 27-year-old plant sciences graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, whose blog promotes the technology. “There’s so much stuff going on that nobody even knows about,” says Von Mogel. “There is this huge potential if we use the science to pursue those things that are possible.”

I think I need to check a magazine rack to make sure this is real…

Too bad it didn’t mention Biofortified by name! I’ve got to make the site look pretty, we may have company.

Wait I thought I was 28?